Brent crude is on track for its third weekly gain today, supported by an optimistic report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) that said the market may have reached its bottom.
Still, analysts cautioned that a large glut of oil remained, with Goldman Sachs warning that US crude could saturate storage in the coming months.
US crude futures

China's National People's Congress has set the country's growth target for 2016 in a range of 6.5%-7%.Premier Li Keqiang made the announcement in his opening speech, warning of a "difficult battle" ahead.The annual meeting in Beijing sets out to determine both the economic and political agenda for the country.
It comes at a time when China

United Technologies has rebuffed another merger offer from Honeywell International on concerns it will not be approved by antitrust regulators.Honeywell is said to have offered $108 (£76) per share for United Technologies last week, a more than 20% premium to the share price at the time.United Technologies said the two firms only held

US Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen has poured cold water on the prospect of a second rise in interest rates any time soon.She warned financial conditions in the US had become "less supportive" of growth.The US central bank released Ms Yellen's prepared comments ahead of her latest appearance before Congress.The bank raised interest rates by

DUBAI: The United Arab Emirates plans to outsource most government tasks to the private sector and cut the number of ministries, Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum said Monday.
The announcement comes as energy-rich Gulf Arab states have been hit by low oil prices, encouraging them to streamline institutions and attract more

Workers at Google Ireland, the search group’s European sales hub, earn less than half the £160,000 average wage of colleagues in London despite the British sales team only providing a supporting role to their Irish counterparts.
Google bosses will be grilled by parliament’s public accounts committee this week over how they have

CAIRO: Suspicions that a bomb sent a Russian passenger plane crashing into the Sinai Peninsula are damaging Egyptian tourism in ways that five years of political upheaval did not. About 1 million tourists visited Egypt in November and December, down 41 percent from last year and the lowest number during these peak months since at least 2005,

DUBAI: Arab equities trimmed their worst January in seven years after oil capped its second weekly advance. Dubai’s DFM General Index led gains in the region, climbing to the highest in more than three weeks as the number of shares traded was almost double the six-month average. Abu Dhabi’s ADX General Index had the biggest increase in

Anas Silwood moved to Jordan from Britain to study Arabic back in 2000. The 20-something was supposed to stay for only a few months, but he soon decided Amman was the place he wanted to be. He learned Arabic, converted to Islam and settled.
"Every time I went back to the UK I had the same problem," he says. "People looked at me in a funny way

Chinese authorities have arrested 21 people involved in an online finance scheme which is suspected of defrauding 900,000 investors of about 50bn yuan ($7.6bn; £5.3bn).The 21 people worked for Ezubao, a peer-to-peer lender widely described in Chinese state media as a Ponzi scheme.Ezubao is believed to be China's largest such online financing